Zille says she doesn’t think her actions have impacted DA’s performance

Speaking to 702’s Bongani Bingwa on Monday morning in an effort to clear up misinterpretations of her recent column, former DA leader and Western Cape premier Helen Zille stated that she did not believe her tweets about colonialism and controversies surrounding her leadership affected the DA’s performance in the recent national election.

This after Bingwa quoted a section from her column on his show and later shared the tweet, incorrectly labelling the quote a reflection “on bringing in black leaders into the DA”.

The quote was originally from her article published in Rapport at the weekend and later reported on by Business Day.

Zille took exception to Bingwa’s interpretation and the pair engaged in a back and forth online that resulted in the show’s producers calling Zille in an effort to allow her to clarify.

“Well, Bongani you can read it exactly as I put it and it is right there on PoliticsWeb as a column, very easy to get. So you don’t have to go and read selective quotes and get interpretations from them, you can read what I said in English,” said Zille.

She went on to explain what she meant the “tiger that she mounted”.

“I did exactly the right thing. It was quite correct to diversify the DA. It was absolutely essential to do that, in fact. Where I was mistaken was to think that that would enable the DA to rise above the politics of race and focus on politics of principle and policies that could help South Africa rise above poverty and awful unemployment rates.”

When asked whether or not her actions, her leadership and the DA’s other public battles may have led to the party’s marginal loss in support after the 2019 elections, Zille answered in the negative and attributed their loss to what she called “race-based politics”.

“Well, you simply have to look at the results and where we lost votes. That’s all you have to do. You’ve just got to go look at the statistics and see if that’s true,” she said.

“The thing that really shook us was the question of the race-based politics and falling into the ANC/EFF’s race-based narrative that lost us huge numbers of votes to the right,” added Zille.

She went on to say that it was sad because the right wing stood for the kind of politics she stood against.

Listen to the full audio clip here.

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